


Enough

by Mad_Max



Category: 1984 - George Orwell, Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Big Brother Is Watching You, George Orwell - Freeform, brick references, unnamed bad guys - Freeform, warning: character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-31
Updated: 2013-07-31
Packaged: 2017-12-21 23:54:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/906445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Max/pseuds/Mad_Max
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Grantaire is a pathetic, crumpled heap of pallid skin and fragile bones and deep, purple and black bruises overlapping faded brown bruises, black at the creases, with thinning hair and a terrible, toothless black mouth that gapes at him from the chair he has been strapped down to as they enter.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>  <i>As ugly as he had been in freedom, he is physically repulsive now in every way imaginable, and Enjolras cannot help but think that he has never been so beautiful. </i></p><p> </p><p> </p><p>  <i> A 1984/Les Mis crossover in one shot.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Enough

**Author's Note:**

> I just really wanted a Les Mis/1984 crossover?

He does not know if it has been weeks, months, hours, minutes or days. There is no sun in the Ministry of Love. Enjolras keeps a watch at all times on his person, he remembers vaguely, but Enjolras is not here. He is alone. He doesn’t know how long it’s been; it hardly seems to matter.

 

In the beginning, he could count the passage of time in beatings, but the bruises littering his skin have become too many to differentiate the one from the other, the ache in his fractured bones and parched brain so constant as to cause him to wonder if any time has passed at all. Perhaps they have found a way to trap him in the same hour for eternity. Perhaps they mean to beat him on repeat until he is little more than a limping blood clot, incapable of thought, of belief, of living, of willing, of dying.

 

He smiles bitterly to himself at the memory of those words. If there is any such thing as truth left in the world, it is embodied in the pin-straight spine, icy gaze and firm, red mouth that are Enjolras.

 

An incensed, bellowing female voice bursts from the Televisor.

 

“Grantaire!”

 

If he has heard her, he shows no sign of it, grinning inanely to himself in the far corner.

 

“2718 Grantaire N.! No smiling!”

 

The grin dies on his chapped lips, and he crawls, wheezing, to his cot. Should he sleep? Could he sleep, if he chose? He doubts it. If he has slept at all here, it was always an uneasy, uncomfortable, dreamless slumber. The time he spends awake is a nightmare in itself. Maybe he is asleep. Maybe he’s in his bed at home right now, in his rickety, shitty flat, with the next-door neighbours’ shouting children and the postbox that never closes properly. Maybe he is asleep in the common room, and the footsteps he hears belong to Feuilly, come to wake him before he draws too much attention to himself. Maybe the slam of the door is Bossuet - but no, Bossuet, the unluckiest of their group, went missing months ago.

 

Bossuet is dead. Vaporised. An unperson.

 

Curling in on himself, Grantaire chokes down the whimper that threatens to tear his throat in two, squeezes his eyes shut. His shoulders and hips are blooming with pain as the weight of his wasted body presses them against the hard cot, but he hasn’t got the strength to move. What would be the point? There is no such thing as comfort in this cell.

 

He shouldn’t be comfortable, he thinks. At some point, he will surely break. He was always the ill-fit in the group. The square peg. He is weak. He is afraid. Because there is probably no life after death, he thinks, in which he can be forced to repent for his coming crimes; it is only fitting that he should live out his Hell in these last hours of his life on Earth.

 

* * *

 

By the time he realises it, it’s like being kicked in the teeth. He does a silent headcount. Another.

 

Even though it has been over six months, even though he knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he will not find it, his eyes search out the sweat-slicked bald head that should be shaking with laughter or bobbing along to a conversation with Joly and Grantaire at a corner table.

 

But, Bossuet is dead, has been dead long enough that he shouldn’t have to search him out every time. Habit, he thinks.

 

It takes him longer to realise the gaping amount of space, the silence left in the wake of the missing mass of tangled, black curls and the haze of cigarette smoke that does not cloud up the back corner of the café; Grantaire has not returned to them.

 

Still, he refuses to cater to the idea that Grantaire has died. Not yet.

 

Not two weeks later. Nor five. Nor six.

 

By the time he has begun to accept the spreading sense of foreboding, like a block of ice trickling from his throat into his chest, two months have gone by. No one mentions it. They mention very little since their return from the Ministry of Love.

 

Enjolras and Combeferre had been the first to be released. He had seen in Combeferre’s eyes, the moment they found his, that his friend was lost. They greeted one another cordially. Combeferre bought him a drink. Come evening, they parted ways with dull murmurs about meeting again soon.

 

Courfeyrac joined them shortly after. It took Enjolras several days to be able to place the sense that something was slightly off about his good friend. Where before had burnt a blazing heat - the energy of a sun - flickered a lukewarm flame not unlike that of a dying candle. They shared a round of Victory Gin. Courfeyrac complained good-naturedly about the tobacco that fell from his cigarette. They had all laughed at that, and Enjolras thought he had never heard an uglier sound in his life.

 

Bahorel and Feuilly arrived together. They had found one another at a rally before bumping into Courfeyrac one evening on a street corner.

 

Jehan, whose pride and joy had once been the secret collection of Oldspeak words he had “saved” from incineration after he’d been forced to cut them from the latest volume of the Newspeak dictionary, spent his days staring languidly into a glass of gin that he occasionally stirred but never drank from in his living room, until he’d been searched out and dragged to the café by an insistent Bahorel.

 

Joly was pale and smiled rarely - a far cry from the impossibly cheerful, eccentric young man whose good humour had spurned them on in the last few days before the arrests. He spoke little, if at all now. No one asked why. They all felt the lack of Bossuet’s presence in every lull in their conversation, waiting for the sarcastic quips and the jokes that never came.

 

Now, re-united, they spread themselves over three tables in the back corner of the Chestnut Tree Café.They never speak of politics. They say nothing of Grantaire.

 

Only Enjolras watches the windows, waiting for the wild mass of black, the grease-stained hands, the large nose that does not pass by. Waiting for the hoarse, gin-soaked voice to cut in with something vulgar and witty and annoying.  

 

When three months have passed, and still Grantaire does not come, he decides to face the inevitable. Grantaire, the most morally corrupt, the most intelligent but utterly incapable of their group, is an unperson. He mouths his goodbyes in the dark of his bedroom, not caring if the Televisor sees - it’s too late for that anyway, isn’t it?

 

* * *

 

They come for him in the night. There is little time to struggle against the sack they use to cover his head and the binds on his wrists before he is bodily thrown into the back of a waiting truck and trundled off. He wonders if his neighbours heard the commotion, if they kept their eyes shut and regulated their breathing so as not to attract the attention of the Televisor. It hardly matters now, but he hopes, for his neighbours’ sake, that they have heard. That they fear. That they burn with the same anger simmering in the pit of his gut as he is tossed into a cell, vision restored, and told to remain seated.

 

Seated and silent.

 

He does not need to wait long before the door swings open again. His head is bowed. He sees the shiny toes of their black boots but hears the rent in the air, feels the blow of the cudgel that echoes in his skull, tastes the tangy, coppery bubbles of blood on the inside of his cheek, smells the clinical cold of the hall that they drag him through. Sees their boots.

 

“Room 11,” says a voice behind them. It is not the rigidly wooden tone of Javert, who had been in charge of his own re-education. Not that it matters. It does not matter.

 

“Where is Javert?” he demands, as soon as they have ground to a halt before the door.

 

Grey eyes meet his. Cold and impenetrable, more robot than human. But, this is a human, he reminds himself. A human being, another victim of Big Brother’s. An unfortunate. A casualty.

He has to tell himself that there is blood in those veins, not petrol, because he doesn’t believe it, and he wants to hate this frigid, impassive creature with every fibre of his being - ideals be damned - for the dispassionate reply that it issues:

 

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

 

With that, the door is unlocked.

 

Grantaire is a pathetic, crumpled heap of pallid skin and fragile bones and deep, purple and black bruises overlapping faded brown bruises, black at the creases, with thinning hair and a terrible, toothless black mouth that gapes at him from the chair he has been strapped down to as they enter.

 

As ugly as he had been in freedom, he is physically repulsive now in every way imaginable, and Enjolras cannot help but think that he has never been so beautiful. His eyes, glassy and frightened, his wild, trapped-jackrabbit glare; his jagged, flaking fingernails digging into the tender flesh of his palms. Fear and pain and raw hope radiate from him in bursts like flares from the sun.

 

He says: “Enjolras,” and Enjolras has to fight to keep the stricken expression from his own face as the cracked edges of that word assault his ears, dragging with them the ghosts of late nights in the hidden back room at the Musain, the boom of Grantaire’s voice as he’d ranted, the trickles of laughter, snatches of conversation tangled and melded into one another and woven into the very fabric that had held their group together. For freedom and brotherhood and equality for all, they had sworn. For the future they would certainly not live to see. For the carefree laughter of children they would never have. For the sake of other men and women, in another time, living - rather than dying - as friends.

 

“Enjolras,” repeats Grantaire softly, and those eyes pierce like pikes in his breast.

 

The man who does not know what happened to Javert, who is not Javert (Javert is dead, thinks Enjolras wildly, and wonders what happened), cuts the distance between himself and Grantaire in two even strides. Tugs him up by the crown of his dirty head to strain against his bonds.

 

“You see, Grantaire?” His fingers twist cruelly through the few strands of limp, black hair that Grantaire has managed to maintain. “Here is your untouchable leader, your priest of the ideal. Do you see him? Do you see the flesh on his bones? He looks rather well-fed, don’t you think? Rather too well-fed for a prisoner.”

 

“I don’t care,” grunts Grantaire, writhing. “I don’t care what he looks like.”

 

“No.” The fingers release him. “No, I don’t suppose you do. You have seen yourself - ”

 

“I was always ugly.”

 

“Surely you can see the difference between the both of you? You - who refuse to renounce your wicked ways and learn to love Big Brother as you should, and he? No?”

 

The difference, Enjolras thinks, is that Grantaire has nothing left to lose. Grantaire has only ever believed in one thing, would hold out under every torture, every pressure until the very end of his days for that belief. He had scorned it once, for what was the use in pinning every hope for your soul onto a single mortal man?

 

“A difference,” wheezes Grantaire.

 

“Yes?”

 

“There are plenty of differences. Shall I write you a list? Compose you a poem? It’s a pity I was never good at poetry, or I could write you an epic, but I am no poet.” He coughs. “You ask me what the difference is between Enjolras and I, and the first thing that comes to mind is our names, you see. Perhaps in a later version of Newspeak, one day, you’ll be able to blot out the phonetic difference between names, but until then....”

 

The hand returns to his hair, jerks him up, but Grantaire is burning, crackling with the flames of his contempt and his pain and his hope. “Enjolras is about five inches taller than I am. He has blonde hair. He is a member of the Inner Party, and I of the Outer....”

 

“Enough.”

 

“I don’t care what he looks like!” shrieks Grantaire suddenly, his face collapsing in on itself. “I’ve told you I don’t care what he looks like, and I don’t care what you do to him, because I believe in him, and I hate you, and I am tired, and I am wretched, and I am weak, and I am bored of your questions and your stupidities, and I am ready to die! Let Big Brother go to the Devil!”

 

“Grantaire!” He barks the name before he can think twice to stop himself, his feet clearing the space between them of their own accord. Fighting the urge to recoil from that broken face, from those terrible eyes, Enjolras fixes Grantaire with the coldest glare he can muster.

 

Grantaire, for his part, seems to have forgotten how to breathe.

 

“Do you remember,” says Enjolras stiffly, his eyes hard, his mind whirring, buzzing, hoping and praying that Grantaire is not too far gone, that he will understand, that he will grasp the true meaning behind these words and give this all a point, “when I told you that you would be incapable of believing, of thinking, of willing, of living - ”

 

“ - and of dying,” finishes Grantaire quietly. His eyes soften. “And I said, ‘you will see’.”

 

He has to force the harsh edge into his voice, to sharpen his eyes, to grit his teeth against the words he would rather shout. Against the accusations and the righteous anger and the fury and his hate for this system. It would be pointless to say any of those things, to be tortured and forced to the breaking point again, so he bites them back. He says, “You always had a talent for disappointing me.”

 

For a moment, he worries that the meaning of his words has been missed. With a strangled sob, Grantaire flinches away from him. But his fingers press still into the palms of his hands. His jaw is set as he averts his gaze. He makes no further attempt at protestation.

 

“Now, Grantaire,” purrs the man who is not Javert, “Do you accept Big Brother’s love and forgiveness for your treachery?”

 

The answer, though dull, is immediate. “I do.”

 

“What is the sum of two and two?”

 

“Five.”

 

The hands encircling his upper arms are unrelenting in the vice-like strength of their grip as they tug him away, but it’s an unnecessary force; he offers no resistance. Time, Enjolras has always known, would have to run out eventually.

 

He can feel the pierce of Grantaire’s eyes at the back of his neck, imagines those flaking, dirty fingernails pressed into the palm of his own hand, Grantaire’s hand in his. It’s as close as they will ever come to standing together against the Party, a fantasy confined to the claustrophobically narrow space within his own skull, but it is a burn that radiates, an energy that bursts from him like a flare from the sun, a shared sun, an ideal bound to his own love for all and Grantaire’s love for one; it is enough.

  
Their leather boots squeaking with each step, the guards lead him into the hallway. He stares ahead of them at nothing, at the empty air and the flickering, unnatural light, at the bland walls. The smile that blossoms at the corners of his mouth has barely enough time to complete itself as the report sounds.


End file.
